The Canada Jay

Credit: Maïna Percolas

Canada Jays nest extraordinarily early in the year. Nest-building may start in February when there may be a metre of snow on the ground. In the southern part of the Canada Jay’s range, eggs are laid on average around March 21; hatch around April 10; and the young leave the nest around May 1—well before most migratory birds have even returned to the boreal forest, let alone begun to nest themselves. The sight of a female Canada Jay snuggled down on her eggs in 30 below weather, or of jay parents feeding nestlings in the middle of a raging blizzard, is among the most amazing spectacles of nature.

Credit: Dan Strickland

Several things make early nesting possible. Canada Jay nests are large and well insulated thanks, in part, to hundreds of cocoons that fill in the interstices of the bulky platform of dry dead twigs. Close to the centre are finer twigs, strips of bark, arboreal lichens, and finally, lining the cup itself, several hundred grouse feathers or an equivalent amount of hair or fur. The cup is just large enough to contain the body of the female and two to five eggs (but most often three). Whether it is built close to the trunk of a spruce or fir  or out on a long branch, the nest is almost always on the south side of the tree, within one metre of the outside tips of the tree’s foliage, and very often on the north side of a clearing, creek edge, or some similar break in the forest. This means the nest and the incubating female receive a little more direct sunlight than might otherwise be the case.

Unlike most other birds, a female Canada Jay sits on her nest beginning with the first egg, apparently to keep it from freezing. True incubation starts when the last egg is laid and, 18 days later, all the eggs hatch within a few hours of each other. At first, the male brings all the food for the nestlings. They hatch as tiny pink nestlings, their backs thinly covered by grey, wispy down. The female broods over them for the next week or so, after which they are big and well feathered enough that she can start accompanying the male on his foraging trips. The parents gather food until their bulging throats can hold no more and then they silently glide to the nest to feed the young. By maximizing their food loads, the adults keep their flights to the nest down to an absolute minimum (about once an hour). This helps keep the nest location a secret from Red Squirrels, a common and dangerous nest predator in Canada Jay country. For the same reason, the adults prevent any nonbreeding Canada Jay on their territory (such as one of their young from the year before) from ever going to the nest. Nonbreeders are thus prevented from helping to feed the young—although they are allowed to do so after the young leave the nest. (Red Squirrels are not a significant threat to flying young so it doesn’t matter after nest-leaving time if the young receive many noisy feeding visits from adults and nonbreeders). The young can normally fly by the time they are 21 days old but they usually stay in the nest for another two or three days. Late departure means the young are more capable fliers when they finally do leave. This probably lessens the chances of a crash landing on melting snow or, worse, in the icy meltwater that often floods spruce bogs in late April.

The most important thing that Canada Jays do in order to succeed in their late winter nesting is to store food the previous summer and fall. Although some insect life becomes available on warm, sunny days in April, there can be no doubt that previously stored food provides, at the very least, a sort of “bad weather insurance.” This allows Canada Jay parents to undertake the huge, energy-demanding task of reproduction at a time of year when the forest contains almost no obvious food supply. But explaining how Canada Jays get away with nesting so early is not nearly as important as explaining why they do it. Why don’t Canada Jays nest in May and June the way other boreal forest birds do? Wouldn’t they produce more surviving young if they timed their nesting to coincide with the annual peak in insect abundance?

Credit: Dan Strickland

The answers to these questions may lie with the fact that early-nesting Canada Jays can invest more food storage effort in their territories than hypothetical late-nesting pairs. Accumulating the largest possible food stores may be crucial in allowing Canada Jays to have enough stored energy to last all winter. This means they can stay at home and avoid having to migrate and to expose themselves to the terrible dangers of travelling long distances through unfamiliar country. Thus, even if early-nesting Canada Jays cannot produce as many young per year as they would by nesting in warmer weather, they probably still produce more young over their entire lifetimes. This is simply because they live longer and get to breed more times than if they nested late (but also had to migrate and therefore died, on average, at a younger age). Seen in this light, it is only partly true that food storage is what allows early nesting to succeed. It may be even truer to say that early nesting is what allows food storage to succeed!

Credit: Brittany Crossman/Getty

When young Canada Jays leave the nest at 23 days of age, they are well feathered (though short-tailed) and they can fly quite well. For their first two weeks out of the nest, however, they spend most of the time sleeping in thickly foliaged conifers, often huddled together on the same branch. When they hear their parents approaching, they spring to life and, with flapping wings, gaping red mouths, and sustained squalling notes, they vie with each other for some of the incoming food. Bouts of feeding are followed by exercise and perch changes, and sometimes by a series of short flights totalling 100 metres or so before they settle down and wait for the next food delivery.

By the time the young are 44 days old (about 21 days after leaving the nest), they are truly skilful fliers and their tails are full-grown. From then on, they almost always accompany the adults through the forest. Although they relentlessly beg for food, at this point they start to pick up food by themselves—and even store it. The parents then feed them less and less and, by 50 days old, the young are nutritionally independent. In the continent-spanning Boreal form of the Canada Jay, this sets the stage for a radical new development in the fledglings’ lives. Between the ages of 55 and 65 days, the young increasingly fight among themselves and one eventually succeeds in expelling its former nest-mates from the natal territory. Henceforth the dominant juvenile (a male in 75 per cent of cases) will accompany its parents alone through the summer, fall and winter of its first year. As for the ejected birds (the majority of which are females), they quickly leave, and a few succeed in attaching themselves to unrelated pairs, particularly those that have failed in their own nesting that year. Most ejected juveniles aren’t so lucky, however. Sixty per cent of them are dead by their first autumn, as opposed to only 20 per cent of the dominant juveniles that get to stay with their parents and benefit from their example and protection.

Credit: Hugues de Milleville

The nonbreeding Canada Jays that survive stay on their natal or adoptive territories and use them as a safe base from which to search the surrounding country for a newly opened vacancy in the resident breeding population. When they find one, they quickly move in and replace the former breeder. Members of a mated pair usually stay on the same territory for the rest of their lives. When one of the pair dies, it too is quickly replaced by another bird from the local nonbreeding population.